Reflections in a fender

Heard any good design buzz lately? If you have, it's certain to be about Donna or Calvin or Tommy, and all they do is sketch low-style Ts and swimsuits to the knees.

For sure nobody's talking about J Mays and John Herlitz. How come?

Fact is, car design is sexier than frontless and backless python sheaths and a whole lot more interesting. Influential, too. We almost don't notice the ubiquity of car language, reproduced car shapes and car styling cues in everything from electric shavers to tableware. Clothing fashion has a half-life of 48 hours; what's de rigueur now becomes something else overnight. We are at the mercy of the strange tides of New York and California whimsy when it comes to what we wear, haute couture transmutes into everyday hipness in the inner city, disappearing as quickly as it came. (Have you looked at the stock price of Nike these days? The era of the adorable shoe seems to be on the wane.)

Sheetmetal used to be that way, thanks to Alfred P. Sloan, and for the same reason: Planned Obsolescence. We were a nation of car ignoramuses enchanted by colors and strange surface devices and almost not at all aware or caring about what lay underneath. Not any more. Cars cost too much,and flash doesn't appeal to the knowledgeable. To demonstrate that, all you have to do is compare the physiology of a three-toned '50s Dodge Coronet with that of an Intrepid, marking particularly style and proportion.

Anyway, it says here that clothing designers are butterflies flitting from one succulent blossom to another. To them what counts is the taste of the moment.

Not true of car designers. Like people who create buildings, they express the national design understanding. Architects make cityscapes that can be said to reflect our aesthetic stage of life. Car designers, too. Both build on the past to understand where we are and what will please us. It's a matter of how we see ourselves, and that takes self-reflection. At least certainty of purpose.

The Germans do this best (can there be any question about what Porsche thinks of itself and how it wants to see its image in the mirror? Or Mercedes?), the Italians next best. From Fiat to Ferrari they express the attitudes, tastes and understanding of a nation, frenetic at the low end, sensuous at the top. Then come the Americans. While our automotive shapes still bow to Sloanist principles, they do so much less than they did. Have you contemplated how far Lincoln and Cadillac have come since the '50s? (Don't cite the great cars of the '30s, Packards, Duesenbergs and Pierces of memory partook of the traditions revered by the classic coachbuilders. What's more, they were not built in quantity but made and sold to the discriminating rich.)

So there we are, moving toward design maturity which is really no more no less than an understanding of national self, expressed in metal shapes.

You need only to look at the Japanese to see how this evolution takes place.

The Japanese industry is very young, and it has an undeveloped sense of what it is or should be in terms of style. Accords and Camrys aside-they are highly utilitarian and utterly bland-their highline cars are at best derivative. How could they be anything else? It takes time to develop national image, time to see a matured reflection in the shiny surfaces of a fender.

Best example I can imagine of a nation whose soul is expressed in the shapes of its cars is France. Utterly and completely quirky, non?

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